In Spring 2025 I taught a class, for the second time, I called Zoom Text Talk Insta Sing Chat: Modalities and Media of Interaction. It was really a linguistic anthropology class focused on media, an outgrowth of a class I’d taught more than a decade earlier that I called New Media, itself an outgrowth of Doing Things With Words in the ‘aughts (2004) when the thing students got super-excited about was their study of then-new Instant Messaging on AOL, AIM. We did an extensive study and this got picked up by Anthropology News.
As an anthropologist, I believe that the world around us is filled with opportunities and needs for deep analysis, for discovery of general principles and concepts, and for wonder. As a teacher, my biggest goals for my classes include students developing independence in their inquiry, confidence in their ability to learn, interest in going beyond the surface and the obvious, analytic skills + ethics, and appreciation for variation. Whether they remember every technical term or can identify every analyst is far less important. Almost none of my students will become anthropologists, but they will all be members of society, often with professional power, and I want my fellow citizens (using that in a non-technical way, which includes non-US-citizens) to appreciate the work it takes to learn deeply.
For at least two decades, I’ve incorporated projects and non-academic writing into my classes, and for a decade (well, nine years) I’ve used ungrading-until-the-end portfolio-and-reflection-and-conferences practices. I’ve aimed to foster curiosity and genuine outcomes for students’ work and learning, not just learning for a test or for a teacher. I’ve talked with hundreds of students about their immediate forgetting of material they’ve learned for grades, and I’ve been thrilled when students tell me that there is something in our classes that “I'll remember forever.” (This has happened more than once.)
So in my Zoom Text Talk class—which begins with the origins of language, writing, printing, and ends with artificial intelligence—we wrote a book. It's not a codex, a bound book with paper pages, but it’s a book with chapters, digitally available. (You can read about the history of the book, for example here and also more specifically about the contrast between physical and digital books here.)
I spoke several times with the students about the need for all of us to have a digital presence and the fact that everyone will be investigated prior to getting jobs. Having an academic product associated with their name can be positive. But also, digital is forever. So I wanted them to think about this.They all gave consent for their work to be published.
And…can you say “excited”? When I asked in the end-of-semester reflection how they felt about their work being published, having a public audience, they were all amazed! They had become completely used to their schoolish products simply existing in the Canvas/LMS submission, never to be unearthed again, with an audience of one, the judging teacher, and the goal a grade posted in the LMS. Writing for the public, with the possibility of actual readers, meant that they cared about getting it more polished. They returned to the work, edited it, gave each other feedback.
All this is not because they were getting points or grades for the work, but because they had been driven by their own curiosity to learn about something in ways that were responsible and feasible, and wanted to share their learning.
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The projects were not a full semester’s worth of work, though they were informed by what we had done in the first part. Midway through the semester, as we concluded our section on “Old Media,” students generated topics that we’d covered and then wrote brief summaries, mostly in pairs, with some prompts.
When did it begin? Did someone invent it? Was there opposition? On what grounds? How did it spread?
What function(s) is it best for?
How does it work?
Is it primarily physical/oral/textual/visual/other/combo?
What is it best for?
What would be really hard to do with it?
Who is involved in production?
Who is involved in consumption?
Who owns it?
Who profits?
Who pays?
Is it equally distributed or do some have more access than others?
What are the required materials?
What knowledge is needed? How is this acquired?
How does it build on previous media?
Is it instantaneously transmitted? Does it endure through time? Is there a lag? What is involved in preservation?
What privacy and security conditions are made difficult, impossible, or inevitable? Is it risky? How so?
Is it one-to-one? One-to-many? Many-to-one? Many-to-many?
How do questions of identity play out? Think about: language itself; ethnic, racial, and national boundaries; gender; age; social class; other.
Other notable dimensions?
I asked them to begin, if it made sense, with a story. Some did. A few clearly used Chat GPT to help them; I hadn’t explicitly addressed this. Some were more thorough than others.
The second half of the book is a set of studies they had conducted, some during class time. They present their investigations in a variety of formats, from podcasts and videos to slides, and a printable zine. If they used interviews, they got written consent. If they used surveys, they ensured anonymity.
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Then the task was to publish it. I promised them that I would create a PDF and host it on my own website, and promote it via my social media. I also was reminded just this week of my university library’s digital research repository, Curate ND. I first created a PDF, then had trouble securing it from further comments or alterations, so went down a “PDF or E-PUB” rabbit hole, then used calibre to edit it as an epub but it produced a single-page document, then called our OIT who easily got the PDF secured by a password. You know. A few hours of digital adventure…
The timing is always a challenge, of course, because once the semester, and in this case the academic year, is over, students scatter and stop checking their email. They have been trained to regard all their academic work as contained within the space of a semester, not having a life beyond it. I’ve requested some follow-up, which has not always been satisfied.
So the book is imperfect. But it's also wonderful.
It was created in a matter of a few weeks, by busy students, many graduating and a few athletes recruited to professional teams, while they took many other courses and looked toward graduation, employment, travel, and more.
Please take a look. Learn from these twenty-three young learners and writers. They have learned, and now they are sharing with the world.
